Barack Obama is a very smart man. But smart men have been President-Elect before and have been conned by their predecessors. One of the smartest was John F. Kennedy. Like Obama, Kennedy was trying to forge a unity government. He put Republicans in his cabinet (McNamara at Defense, C. Douglas Dillon at Treasury). When he went into a series of meetings with intelligence officials, JFK learned about the nearly completed training and planning for a U.S. backed invasion of Cuba to overthrow Fidel Castro. Kennedy, who also met with President Eisenhower, convinced himself that Allen Dulles’ and Richard Bissell’s CIA invasion plan would work.
When he took office, the new President actually thought the CIA knew what it was doing. By the spring of 1961, the invasion became the fiasco known as the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy took full responsibility. He fired Dulles at the CIA and made his brother Bobby his watchdog. JFK soon discovered that Bobby fell in love with the idea that the CIA could make problems “disappear” through covert action. It took JFK two years and ten months to learn it was all nonsense. By the time he realized the truth, the Agency had botched the overthrow of the South Vietnamese Diem regime. Kennedy decided to close down the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and merge its functions into the Pentagon. Days before he was gunned down, President Kennedy called in Marine General David M. Shoup and asked him to take over the CIA in Kennedy’s second term for the purpose of “… taking it apart board by board and scattering it to the four winds.”
Kennedy never got the chance.
If Barack Obama is serious about applying the lessons of history, he needs to pay close attention to what nonsense the policy community is selling these days. The 2008 version of the Bay of Pigs is the idea that Saudi Arabia can “negotiate with the Taliban” to bring peace to Afghanistan.
The news that the Bush Administration is considering negotiations with the Taliban is an acknowledgement of the tragic waste of the United States military in pursuing Al Qaeda. From the dark day we prevented our own forces from going after Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora and farmed out the job to local tribal leaders, our policy has been dictated by the Saudis who funded the 9/11 terrorists. The ugly truth is that our military is fighting two wars under a President who permitted the Saudi Royal family to have veto power over our actions against Al Qaeda. Are we going to compound this terrible mistake by listening to the Saudis and trying to make a peace deal with the same Taliban who stuffed bin Laden’s featherbed in Afghanistan as he trained his forces to kill Americans?
Now, in what is the most poignant and awful turn in the war on terror, General Petraeus wants to transfer his team’s methods to Afghanistan: from paying off Sunni chiefs in Iraq to paying off Taliban chiefs to rat on Al Qaeda. So the solution in Afghanistan is to give money to Al Qaeda supporters not to kill us. The more rational approach might be for the new President to go to the House of Saud and say: If you don’t stop funding these murderous thugs, we will do what George Bush originally promised the American people: The United States will destroy anyone who provides comfort and support to Al Qaeda.
Out of fairness, this idea did not originate with the General, it originated with the House of Saud, home of the very princes who funded and sent jihadists into America and Afghanistan to murder. This is not the first or only time we have embraced this policy. The Bush Administration looked the other way as the Saudis paid for and sent a steady supply of jihadists to kill Americans in Iraq. Instead of going after our enemies in Saudi Arabia, we decided to pay off Sunni sheiks – before the surge – to create the “the awakening.” Our efforts at segregating Sunni from Shi’a in Iraq tamped down the bombings and violence as long as negotiations on who would be in the government and how the oil revenue would be divided dragged on. Our policy was to pay off sectarians not to kill Americans to buy time for a stronger Iraqi government to take charge. When it became obvious that the Shi’a were not playing ball, the violence began anew. As we learned from the latest triple bombing of a girls’ school, “the awakening” can quickly lapse back into the pre-surge pattern of Sunni/Shia violence.
We have been waiting seven years for George Bush to do what he pledged to do: hunt down bin Laden and his followers. What path President-Elect Obama follows will define his Presidency. Only the Saudis could sell the idea of negotiating with the Taliban. The ugly reality is those who harbor terrorists are terrorists. Making a deal with the Taliban, brokered by the Saudis, may put a band aid on the troop-starved U.S. effort in Afghanistan. But such a deal will simply cover over a festering wound. Out of that infection will come more terrorists. To complicate matters, the Bush Administration has encouraged the Saudis to dispatch jihadists into Lebanon to counter Hezbollah.
What President Obama will face in January is volatile and complex and requires an understanding that we can no longer exempt the Saudis from their responsibility for funding and encouraging extremists.
